Monday, February 18, 2013

Just add a space

So, the thing to do these days seems to be to comment on the idea of renaming (or not renaming) Perl. My gut instinct is that it will do no good and possibly do harm. If I saw a project I had thought was stagnated rename itself with a lot of fanfare and then went and looked at it and found it was in the same state as before, then I would worry about the competence of the people running the project. That said, I think there is definitely a way to have our cake and eat it too here:All we have to do is add a space.

Just add a space to Perl 5.X.X to get Perl 5 X.X. Our language is Perl 5. We should own that fact. Yeah, there is another language named Perl 6 that might be better (if it is every finished) and one named Perl 4 that is worse. We are currently on version 16.2 of Perl 5. Our version number is now significantly more than 6, which lets the people who want to rename Perl to get people to stop paying attention to the fact the Perl 6 is still not production ready to have a version greater than 6 while not confusing the issue.

And while we are at it, let's sit down with Ubuntu and Red Hat and come up with a way to package Perl 5 that suits both us and them. Something that makes their life easier and encourages them to release newer versions of Perl 5, while, at the same time, fits our needs as developers.